Genealogists, you love census records. I would easily nominate you as their No. 1 fan! Census records are rock stars for those who love to research family history. Have you ever wondered what it will be like to research the 2010 Census records in the future? The decisions about what is permanently kept are being [...]

We posted the first version of our social media strategy today on Archives.gov. Our overall approach is to engage our staff, the government community, and researchers and citizen archivists so we can be a more open agency while accomplish NARA’s mission more effectively. We express our core values and strategies for social media in three [...]

Good news for DC-area NARA users- as of today, wireless internet is available to registered researchers at A1 and A2! This means that researchers with laptops and other WiFi-enabled devices will be able to access the online catalog, Ancestry.com, Footnote.com and other great sites via the free wireless connection in public areas of the Archives [...]

We hope you will join us for the last DC-Area Users Group Meeting of 2010, this Friday, November 19th at 1 pm at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, in lecture room B. The agenda for the meeting includes 1. a discussion of the Archives II Saturday pull pilot 2. an update on the [...]

The National Archives recently created a new “Inside the Vaults” video about our citizen archivist initiative. The video features Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero discussing the contributions of the public to the National Archives as well as two citizen archivists, researcher Jonathan Webb Deiss and educational cartoonist Jon White, discussing their work [...]

Thank you to everyone who voted and commented on the Archives.gov homepage designs and features. In total we received 3,257 votes. Interested in knowing how your favorite design did? You can view the results at http://www.archives.gov/open/redesign/vote.html If you have additional ideas or feedback about the redesign of Archives.gov we invite you to share them here [...]

We are excited to announce that the Our Archives wiki is now live at http://www.ourarchives.wikispaces.net Have you made a great find in NARA’s records? Or do you have a story to tell related to our records?  Come share it on the Our Archives wiki! Our Archives is an online space for researchers, educators, genealogists, and [...]

A new participation opportunity is available to you as part of the Archives.gov redesign activities – vote on the Archives.gov homepage designs! The four design candidates will be on display July 6-9 in the National Archives Research Rooms in College Park, MD, and Washington, DC. Learn More here. We’ve set up two ways for you [...]

Several people suggested at the two planning meetings in May that we draft some templates that could be used as starting points for pages in the Archives wiki pilot project.  We have done that and added them to the planning wiki we set up in preparation for the launch of the Archives wiki.  There are [...]

We’re launching a public wiki pilot project that will allow researchers, historians, archivists, and citizen archivists to create pages on records or themes. We need your ideas and enthusiasm to make the wiki a success.  Please join us for the second planning meeting at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, on Wednesday, May 19th from [...]